MANY FOOD LABELS ARE INCORRECT

The "Nutritional Facts" panels on food labels that we've come to rely on to make healthy eating choices often are wrong. Sometimes the claims on the packages and reality are a world apart.

Some of the mistakes are so bad that people on sugar-free diets were eating spoonfuls of sugar without knowing it. People hoping to eat lean are ingesting fat. And those counting their carbohydrates will have to redo their math and add a whole lot more to get the right total.

In the past year, three out of four diet products tested at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services laboratory proved to have erroneous information in their "Nutritional Facts" panels or on their labels. The Tallahassee-based agency frequently tests for the accuracy of nutritional labels, but rarely makes the findings public.

Using Florida's public records laws, the Sun-Sentinel obtained the results of the lab's tests conducted since 1999. An analysis of the data showed nearly 1,000 items with inaccurate food labels.

In the past year alone, more than 1 in 10 bakery products and candies tested in Florida's lab were misbranded. So were one of four dressings and condiments

Breads for Life hot dog and hamburger buns. The labeling claims no sugar. Tests found 3.5 grams of sugar per serving.

Health Valley "fat-free" granola and "Healthy Chips" cookies. Each had more than 1 gram of fat.

Delray Bakery, where a variety of products are sold with the claim "no sugar." At least 17 different tests found 2 to 19 grams of sugar per serving -- the equivalent of a half-teaspoon to nearly 5 teaspoons of sugar.

Few national brands are on the list of misbranded products, experts said, because the big companies are careful to get the information right and retain customer trust.

Offenders tend to be specialty and regional products -- many of them product lines that command top dollar from consumers willing to pay more to think they're eating less.

Relying on numbers

Food manufacturers are required by state and federal law to accurately represent what the products contain. Dietitians tell us to read the "Nutritional Facts" panels to help us eat healthy.

And we've listened. In the decade since the government first began developing uniform labels to spell out a food's calories, fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates and protein, we have come to rely on the numbers when deciding what to buy and eat.

But little is done to keep food makers honest.

Florida is one of the only states that tests food products to see whether the contents match the statements on the label. And when the state finds offenders, it often does no more than send a letter of complaint. At times, that results in a revised label.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last surveyed nutritional labels five years ago. It found inaccuracies in one of every 10 products -- and called that an excellent result.

With hundreds of thousands of products on the shelves, that means tens of thousands of those could be misleading consumers.

Variances allowed

In general, a food company's claims have to be wrong by more than 30 percent to fail tests for nutrition content.

Federal law allows most products a 20 percent variance from the label; a product that says it has 200 calories can legally have 240. A cereal said to contain 10 grams of fiber would be OK even if it really had eight.

In addition, government food labs will account for a margin of error in testing of up to 10 percent.

State Sen. Steven Geller, D-Hallandale Beach, has been on a quest for several months to find out whether low-carbohydrate products are truly that.

"If you have a discrepancy of 3 grams versus 4 grams, that can be a variation from one batch to the next," he said. "If you have 21/2 grams versus 25 grams, and they charge a lot more for it, how can they be accidental?

"I think we're seeing systematic, intentional misbranding."

Geller, who chairs the Agriculture and Consumer Services Committee and is an attorney, has asked the state lab to test foods in numerous South Florida stores.

"If you make claims in writing, which are essentially a warranty, and they are far off from the claims, I think you impute fraud," Geller said. "I want them to clean up their act. If they don't clean up their act, I want them gone."

Joanne Brown, bureau chief of the state food lab, said she has stopped being surprised by what she finds.

"Since we've been doing some of these on and off for the last two years, some of their claims are just ridiculous," she said. "As far as the carbs and some of the claims as far as no sugar, when you taste what they taste like, they can't be."

Companies are not required to test the food. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they use estimates. Sometimes the numbers seem to come out of someone's imagination.

"The average consumer really has no concept that a particular food doesn't have to undergo any testing," said University of Florida food science professor Elaine Turner. "You, as a food manufacturer, don't have to tell the FDA that you're going to create a new food. You just do it."

Dietitians, food watchdogs and industry observers are concerned that knowledge of widespread errors on the labels will undermine consumer confidence.

"It's absolutely essential that those labels be accurate," said Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"Once consumers start to doubt the accuracy of the calories, the fat, the sodium, they all lose value, because we don't know which ones are right and which ones are wrong."

Deceit denied

Nutritional information is often incorrect on products geared to those to whom it matters most: the health-conscious.

Adherents of the Dr. Atkins low-carbohydrate diet who purchased a "Low-Carb Food Bar" expecting to get 2 grams of carbohydrates really were consuming 18 grams, the lab tests showed -- an inaccuracy of 810 percent.

Richard Hirsch, senior vice president of Atkins Nutritionals Inc., said the company has been tussling with the FDA for more than a year over the carbohydrate count on nutrition labels. At issue is the company's practice of understating the carbohydrate count, adding an asterisk denoting that the deducted carbohydrates are not absorbed by the body and therefore shouldn't be counted in the Atkins plan.

The law, however, doesn't permit such subtractions or the inclusion of asterisks. Federal law also prohibits the claim of "low carbohydrate" food because there is no legal definition.

"This is not a question of us trying to do anything deceitful," Hirsch said. "This is an Atkins product for an Atkins consumer."

The company has changed its labels to eliminate the words "low carb," but still has to address the asterisks. Hirsch said the company will reformulate some of its products and remake its labels to comply with federal law sometime in 2002.

Attorneys for the company have been writing to Florida officials since December 2000 with promises that such changes were in the works.

Carbolites Foods Inc. of Evansville, Ind., had three products misbranded by the state lab this year and has been fighting the FDA over carbohydrate labeling. Carbolites' vanilla mousse mix, which claimed 2 grams of carbohydrates, measured 8 grams in state testing. The product also claimed no sugar, but had 4.2 grams of sugar per serving.

"We're very careful with how we label," said Wade Ficklin, vice president of sales and marketing. "We stand by our labeling and where our asterisks are."

Low Carb World and C.K. Distributors, run by Hadas Keynan from North Miami Beach, had six products flunk in testing this year. Tests found brownies that had eight times more carbohydrates than claimed and crackers with more than triple the claims.

Keynan maintains that everything's OK now and that new state tests prove that. But Brown, head of the state lab, said a follow-up round of tests is not complete.

Ground zero

Keynan blamed the manufacturer for a high-fat M-iclair that was supposed to be low-fat. "What the mistake was, I have no idea."

When pressed to name the manufacturer, Keynan said it wasn't one but a combination of manufacturers. "They told us what we needed to correct and we did," she said. "I know that the problem was corrected. Everything was taken care of."

Hirsch said South Florida is known in his business as both ground zero for sales and frauds.

"South Florida is the hotbed of the low-carb world," the Atkins executive said. "Everybody and their brother is going to their garage and making what they claim to be low-carb products.

"We wish we could come down with an army of lawyers and clean up what's going on in Florida. There's a lot of people offering products that don't match up to reality."

Mitch Lipka can be reached at mlipka@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6653.